David Slade of Hard Candy and 30 Days of Darkness signs an alienating and dazed film based on a celebrated novel by Norman Partridge. The review of Dark Harvest by Federico Gironi.
We also have a precise place and date: we are in Bastion, Illinois, in 1962. Place and above all date perhaps not even coincidental, on the contrary, but nevertheless: it seems to be in a place outside of space and time. That very small town with an economy hinged on the cornfields (blood red, certainly) seems to be like Pleasantville, or Seahaven, or maybe Wayward Pines. Bastion – which in reality, lo and behold, doesn’t exist – is pure representation, pure stage, pure imaginative cinematic space. The ideal place for a horror film, especially if this horror film, which is Dark Harvest, plays with the genre and uses it for unusual purposes.
The photography is crystal clear, the tones over the top and the context clear: every year, on Halloween night, the Race takes place. The most handsome and courageous high school students must avoid being killed and, indeed, kill Sawtooth Jack, scary and bloody humanoid scarecrow that rises from the fields to claim victims and curse the crops. He must be stopped before midnight, before he reaches the church, under penalty of years and years of famine. For the rest, during the Race, everyone is free to panic. There are the rebels with the James Dean quiff and there are the jocks, there are the nerds who get off and there is a black girl. The only one. There is, above all, Richie Shepard (Casey Likesalmost a sub-brand of Johnny Depp Of Cry Baby), brother of the winner of the previous year’s Hunt, who would like not to be outdone.
David Slade is that of Hard Candy And 30 days of darkness, he knows the job, but above all he interprets it as he pleases. And so, thanks to the crafty and ironic script of Michael Giliowhich adapts the novel by Norman Partridgeturn an alienating and dazed filmwhere family dramas and completely out-of-context explosions of gore, forbidden love and speeches that attack Capital and its bloody and cannibalistic dynamics mix seamlessly.
In Dark Harvest, the Stephen King of the end of innocence and the dark side of the American Dream, and the more anarchic Victor Salva, that of Jeepers Creepers, collide head-on. While on the side of the road i Misfits And Rusty the wild they watch as umarell, commenting on the sparks that fly from the collision, and Sawtooth Jack reveals himself for what he is: not (just) an apt horror mask, but the victim of monstrosities much bigger than him.
There isn’t much that makes logical, traditional and complete sense in Dark Harvest, and the film – as well as a certain taste for Slade’s image – works precisely for this reason. For its freedom, for its accumulation, for its almost Dadaist chaos which however ends up revealing a precise and coherent design, however imaginative. A note: if “Since I don’t have you” of the Skyliners it’s an apt musical leitmotif of the film, even better would have been the acid version made by Guns N’ Roses at the time of “The Spaghetti Incident?”.
